


cut me to the quick; sew me up again

by Curlscat



Category: The Sisters Grimm - Michael Buckley
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-06-25
Updated: 2019-06-25
Packaged: 2020-05-19 15:34:03
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,586
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19359805
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Curlscat/pseuds/Curlscat
Summary: Puck tries to be nice, sometimes. Usually in a very dramatic, messy way. It backfires, and Sabrina gets hurt.Or: Granny is a terrible driver. If the car is full of glass, she can't drive it, right? Too bad Sabrina has the worst luck.





	cut me to the quick; sew me up again

**Author's Note:**

> Inspired by a wonderful headcanon-session with advisortotheadvisor on tumblr!

Everyone knows Granny is a terrible driver, and most of the time it’s not a big deal. Mr. Canis can drive, and so can Uncle Jake, Henry, and Veronica.

Unfortunately, they’re not always  _ available _ . This week is one of those times. Uncle Jake is off doing… something. Something too dangerous for Puck to come (Puck pouted for about six hours when Jake told him that). Mr. Canis has a broken arm because he keeps forgetting that he’s pretty much a regular old man now and he can’t do things like catch stupid four-year-olds when they try to do dumb things like jump off the roof (Basil cried apologies the whole way to the emergency room). Henry and Veronica are in the city for their jobs.

Sabrina thought she’d wanted to go back to NYC. Once she got there, though, it was too hard to forget all the bad things that had happened to her there. And then, when Moth did that whole kidnapping-and-trying-to-kill-her thing  _ again _ , they’d decided to up and move back in with Granny, to Daphne’s delight. But the jobs were still in the city, so during the week Henry and Veronica were often away for days at a time. Sabrina had a cell phone now, and she made them video chat her every day. Just in case. (The first time Veronica forgot Sabrina had nearly had a panic attack. She’s better now. Mostly.)

Anyway, the long and the short of it is that Granny had to drive Mr. Canis to the ER. Everyone else came, too, for various reasons. Sabrina came because Basil refused to be left at home (“What if Mr. Canis  _ dies _ , Sabby? What if he dies and it’s  _ my fault _ ?”) and, even though she knew it was stupid, she had the vague idea that if she was in the car, she could Granny from driving everyone off the road.

They’re on their way back, now. Mr. Canis, a little out of it on the painkillers they’d put in his IV, crossed himself before he got into the car, which Sabrina completely understands.

The car always runs louder than usual when Granny is driving it, but Sabrina can still hear squeals of glee over the noise as she’s pulled by centrifugal force against the door, so hard her head cracks against the window. One of the people screaming like this is a theme park ride is Puck, of course. The other one, surprisingly, is Red.

Sabrina works her arm up between her head and the window and braces herself. With her other hand, she grabs Basil’s booster seat, white-knuckle tense.

***

They come to a squealing halt at home, without hitting anything other than the curb. Against all odds. The stop throws Sabrina so hard against her seat belt that it cuts off her airways for a second and she’s sure she’s going to bruise. She hears a clunk as Mr. Canis’ cast hits the front of the car.

She gingerly unties the rope that is Basil’s seatbelt and helps him out of the car, ducking under the window. The roof, a replacement for the one Puck ripped off in a hissy fit back before… everything, really-- well, it’s actually a truckbed cap, the kind of thing people put on the backs of their fords so they can pretend they’re not actually trucks, and are instead… what? SUV limos? Sabrina doesn’t know. Either way, it’s messily warped and welded/screwed into the body of the car, and it means the windows don’t open when the doors do on the passenger’s side. She and Basil have to sort of shimmy their way out through the footwell.

She waits until Granny’s out of earshot to say, “She needs to be stopped.”

“What, you didn’t have fun?” Puck asks. “Red did, and she’s a mouse.”

The mouse in question blushes a little and says, “I was scared, but I liked it anyway.”

Sabrina decides to ignore this and just says, “She’s going to get someone killed. With my luck, probably me.

Puck looks thoughtfully at her for a second, which is always a bad sign. Even worse, he doesn’t argue with her. He just says, “Yeah. You do have a track record.”

***

Puck fills Granny’s car with broken glass.

Sabrina doesn’t know how he did it. She doesn’t  _ want _ to know. She just stands and looks at the car, which is  _ literally _ full of shards of glass. Without turning to look at Puck, she asks, “Why.”

Puck sounds a little hurt. “I thought you’d be happy. It’ll keep her from driving.”

Now she does turn to look at him, because this is one of those times he’s trying to be  _ nice _ and, despite how very bad he is at it, Daphne keeps reminding her that it’s good to encourage him if she wants it to stick.

He’s smiling at her, a little smile that’s kind of heart-wrenching in its crooked hopefulness. It’s probably a load of bull, but the smile tugs at her heartstrings, so instead she just rolls her eyes at him. She’s smiling, too, a little.

“Idiot. How are the  _ rest _ of us going to get anywhere?”

Puck makes a thoughtful face. It’s nearly a foot above Sabrina’s head because he’s had another growth spurt and she has yet to have  _ any _ growth spurt, and she wishes she could reach up and shove it off his face because it’s not a look she’s seen very often and she doesn’t know how to respond to it. It’s  _ doing _ things to her. Her stomach flip-flops back and forth.

“Huh,” he says. “I didn’t think of that.”

Daphne, who has apparently been standing on the porch listening, sing-songs “I guess you’ll have to fly us places.”

***

Puck does have to fly them places. He’s not happy about it, but he does it. He even picks up groceries, and takeout once. Sabrina comes with him for the takeout, because she doesn’t trust him not to mess up her order on purpose. He  _ does _ mess up the groceries, but she’s not sure if that’s on purpose or not. Granny sends him back to buy more.

In the meantime, they work on cleaning out the glass. By the time Henry and Veronica get home for the weekend, it’s pretty much gone. Sabrina’s vacuumed the backseat four times, and Granny took the cover off Basil’s booster seat to wash it, just in case (“You couldn’t have taken the stuff out of the car first?” Sabrina asked, and Puck just said, “But then I’d have needed to get more glass.”)

Veronica drives them to the movies Friday night, and everyone else is fine, but when Sabrina buckles her seat belt, she winces, pulls the seat belt away from her chest. There’s a bloody piece of glass stuck through the only actual seat belt in the whole car, and it’s just stabbed into her collarbone.

Figures.

She makes a face, carefully worms the glass shard out of the seat belt, dumps it in the trash, and roots around in her mom’s purse for a band-aid.

*

On the way back, she gets stabbed with a different piece of glass, this one in the back of her seat.

This continues. It doesn’t matter where in the car she sits, pieces of glass keep finding her. She develops a rash of scrapes, mostly on her legs and back, though there’s a particularly annoying one that stabbed straight through her shoe and into the sole of her foot, and another in the pad of her right thumb.

She’d think Puck was doing it, except that Daphne had wanted someone to practice truth spells on anyway, so Sabrina figured why don’t they both get something out of it, and he swore up and down that, hilarious as he found it, he was  _ not _ responsible for this.

Sabrina just had bad luck. Ordinary, terrible, impossible bad luck.

She took to walking most places.

***

Unfortunately, one cannot walk everywhere, and right after Mr. Canis got his cast off, Puck gets himself and Sabrina detention (she’s not going to admit this to anyone, but it was worth it. She maybe even had fun). 

Mr. Canis pulls up to the front of the school three seconds after they reached the edge of the sidewalk, which is pretty impressive timing, even for him. Puck climbs into the car without a second thought, and because she’s in a good mood despite (“ _ not _ because of, stop smirking, Puck”) detention, she throws her bag into the front seat and opens the back door for herself. 

She inspects the car carefully: no glass on the headrest, no glass in the rope that passes for the seat belt, no glass in the footwell. Nothing sticking out of the crack between the seat and its back. No telltale sparkle on the seat itself.

She sits down.

_ Ow _ .

Sabrina twists her leg carefully. Sticking out of the back of her knee is a piece of glass nearly the size of her palm. She looks at it for half a second as blood begins to seep out, soaking into her jeans. Then she nods once, braces herself, and grabs the glass by the flat sides.

Pulling it out hurts worse than it did going in, and it takes longer than it should. The glass cut  _ deep _ .

Very deep.

Once she has the glass out, she feels gingerly at the hole in her pants. She’s been bringing a package of band-aids around with her since this had started, and she wants to see which size to--

Oh.

Okay.

Okay, it’s okay.

“Mr. Canis?” she says, trying to keep her voice steady as she very carefully does not think about what she felt underneath the blood. “I think I maybe need to go to the hospital.”

Mr. Canis meets her eyes in the rear view mirror, apparently sees the truth in them, nods, and pulls a U-turn as aggressive as any of Granny’s maneuvers.

 Puck teases, “Aww, did widdle Sabrina get another piece of glass in her--” Puck cuts himself off with a hiss. “That’s--um. Grimm, that’s a lot of blood.”

“Yes, Puck, I know,” Sabrina says tightly. Her left pant leg, from about mid-calf down, is rapidly changing from blue to the ugly purple-brown she got in kindergarten when she tried to make her own purple play-dough.

It hurts a lot, and it’s making it hard for Sabrina to remember the first aid classes Snow gave her. Pressure on the wound, right. Okay. Um. She presses her hand against the back of her knee, but it hurts, and it mostly just presses her hand into the--don’t think about it--gash in her leg.

Puck’s voice has gone kind of funny a he asks, “How much blood do humans have in their body?”

“Four or five liters,” Sabrina says without really noticing that she’s saying it. “Probably less for me, though, ‘cause--” 

This is the point where Puck usually cracks a short joke, but he doesn’t, today.

The rug under Sabrina’s foot is getting wet. She scooches out so most of her leg is off the seat, less because of the bloodstain she’s inevitably going to leave on the upholstery than because she wants to see if putting pressure  _ above _ her knee will work, since the wound itself is a no-go.

“How--” a loud swallow-- “How much is this, d’you think?”

Seriously?

Sabrina, her hands wrapped firmly around the base of her thigh and squeezing as hard as she can, looks at her leg and then at the floor around it, both of which are looking very damp and bloody. “Um. Half a cup, maybe?”

“How much is that in liters?” Puck’s voice sounds weird.

“I don’t know!” she snaps. “I’m a little  _ busy _ right now.”

She turns to glare at him for being like this  _ right now _ , and then she sees his face.

Oh.

He’s  _ not _ being a pain in the butt.

Puck has gone very pale and is shaking the tiniest bit. He’s backed against the far door of the car, his hands up and half curled, looking like he’s not sure whether to reach towards her or pull back.

Sabrina’s hands have gone a little slippery and definitely a lot shaky. And Puck… looks about as bad as she feels. But his hands are bigger than hers, and she knows they’re stronger, and she’d like to keep as much blood in her body as possible, so she lets go of her leg, drags Puck across the seat by the wrist, and places his hand on the underside of her leg, right above the knee.

“Squeeze,” she tells him.

He blinks at her, still white and shaky.

She puts his other hand on her leg, too, and says, “You put pressure on open wounds. To close the blood vessels some, keep the blood inside.”

He blinks again.

Sabrina pushes at his hands.

Puck gets the memo, and his hands stay put, pressing firmly into her leg.

Sabrina notes, absently, that his hands go all the way around her leg, that his thumbs overlap. Does he have big hands or is she just really skinny?

She might be going into shock, a little.

Yeah, she’s in a lot of pain. Probably shock. Okay.

She doesn’t have anything to do anymore, now that Puck is putting pressure on the wound. If she had a knife with her, she could maybe make a tourniquet or something, but she doesn’t. Her mom has this weird “no weapons, magical or otherwise, at school” policy that is maybe a good idea for a daughter who is bad at secrets and another one who is liable to stab first and ask questions later. It’s a bit of a pain right now, though.

Although she’s shaking pretty bad. She’d probably stab herself again if she tried to cut off part of her shirt, and wouldn’t that be just perfect?

Still. She needs to be doing  _ something _ . She’s always been terrible at sitting still, and her leg  _ hurts _ .

Something occurs to her, and abruptly, she starts giggling.

Puck turns his head, face still pale, to look at her.

“Wouldn’t,” she says, “Wouldn’t it be hilarious, if I died from this? Hundreds of people and monsters tried to kill me, and I bleed out from a piece of glass in my leg?”

Puck, if possible, goes even paler, and his hands clench a little harder at her thigh. “Don’t say that,” he says. “It’s not funny.”

It is a little funny, though. She’s tried so hard to stay safe, to run from magic as if that’ll keep her healthy and happy, and the worst injury she’s ever had comes from a piece of glass in he grandmother’s car.

And what even is the point, then, if she can’t stay safe? What’s the point of blaming magic for all the things that’ve gone wrong in her life if so much of it comes from plain ol’ bad luck?

“Maybe I should just give up,” she says thoughtfully.

Puck gives her the panicked look again. “Give up? Grimm, you’re too tough for that. Don’t you dare.”

Huh. She’d’ve thought he’d be happy if she stopped acting like the magical world was responsible for all her problems. If she settled into her destiny like Daphne. If she stopped acting like a huge part of what makes Puck  _ Puck _ was bad.

***

It occurs to her much later that Puck thought she was talking about dying.

Things went a little hazy in the car ride after that bit. She remembers being carried into the ER. She remembers pain, and loud noises, and Puck’s hands still gripping tight around her leg until Mr. Canis had to practically rip him off.

Now she’s in a bed in a little room off the ER. A nurse came in a while ago (probably about twenty minutes, but it feels like a lot longer) and told her that they want her to run through the IV bag they’ve given her before they think about sending her home.

She looks at Puck, who is definitely trying to get into trouble with the medical equipment stashed in cabinets on the other side of the room, and says, “When I said I should give up, back in the car. Did you think I meant, like, on  _ living _ ?”

Puck doesn’t turn around to look at her. She can see a box of gloves in his hands. That’s probably not a big deal. How much trouble can he possibly get into with rubber gloves? (Besides. She’s tired, and injured. It shouldn’t be her problem to keep him out of trouble, especially not when she’s lying in a hospital bed.)

“I… um… what  _ were _ you talking about?” he asks.

Sabrina snorts. “You totally did. Idiot,” she says fondly.

Puck throws the box of gloves at her. It hits her in the stomach, not hard.

“Watch it,” she says. “I’m wounded.”

She’s a little out of it on the painkillers they gave her, and the aggravation game they usually play seems a lot more fun than usual, even if Puck won’t look at her.

He seems like he’s taking a long time to answer her, and there’s no quip about how she’s a wuss, or it’s just a flesh wound, or anything like that.

“Puck?” she asks, finally. “You okay?”

“I’ve never seen that much blood before,” he says. “I thought--”

Okay. It was a bad injury, yeah. She needed six stitches. She’s gonna need to use crutches for a while because she sliced into a ligament or a tendon or something. But the doctors and nurses hadn’t seemed too worried. Just businesslike.

Puck was worried about her.

“Humans are resilient,” she says. They’d talked about it in biology, a few months ago. Puck probably hadn’t been paying attention. “It’d take more than that to kill somebody.”

“Well how was I supposed to know that?” Puck snaps, still not looking at her. “There was all that blood, and you’re so tiny, and you were talking about  _ dying _ and  _ giving up _ and all I could think about was what I’d do if you died because I--”

Oh.

_ Oh _ .

She almost forgot the glass was Puck’s idea, was the result of Puck trying, in that bass-ackwards way of his, to be  _ nice _ . And he’d thought, he’d actually been scared she was going to-- and that it’d be his fault, because he tried to do something for her.

She needs to do something about this  _ right now _ or he’s never going to try to be nice again.

It would be easier if he’d look at her, though.

She throws the box of gloves back at him, wishing Mr. Canis hadn’t gone home to get Granny, so he could say something terse and wise to make Puck stop feeling guilty. The box, contrarily, doesn’t make it all the way to Puck and instead lands on the floor and bounces into his shoe. Stupid painkillers. Stupid blood loss.

All she can come up with to say is, “Don’t you dare try to take credit for this. It was my weird bad luck and I will not let you claim it as a Trickster King accomplishment.

Puck leans down to pick up the box of gloves, and when he stands up straight again, he finally looks at her.

The walls are nearly the same color as his hair, a plain yellowy color, but his hair is shiny and curling and makes the walls look even more bland than they had before. Sabrina can’t read the expression on his face.

There are things they don’t talk about, the two of them. Puck is growing up, and still a good foot taller than she is. Sabrina woke him up from a sleeping spell three years ago and the way she feels about him hasn’t changed. Their fights with each other have a rhythm to them like a dance, or a sparring match. Last week when she bested him at a sword fight (rare, but getting more common), she couldn’t resist lifting his chin with the flat point of her blade so he had to look her in the eyes as he said “I yield,” and it had felt  _ electric _ . 

But they don’t name this thing between them, that keeps him here as often, if not more, as he’s off with Uncle Jake.They don’t  _ do _ anything.

Sabrina thinks maybe if they had, she’d know what to call the expression on Puck’s face.

“Seriously,” she says, when she can’t stand the silence anymore, the way he’s  _ looking _ at her, “It’s not your fault.”

Puck gives her the tiniest crooked smile, there and gone again in a flash. But the tension is gone, and instead of looking unfathomable and full of a deep longing desperation, he just looks tired.

She grins at him. “You were  _ worried _ about me.”

Puck leans back against the formica counter behind him and says, “Never.”

With uncanny timing, Daphne bursts through the door to jump on top of Sabrina, babbling about being worried and Sabrina having the worst luck. Mr. Canis and Granny follow her in, and then Pinocchio and Red, and one of them says something about Sabrina’s parents heading up on the next train, and the hospital room is suddenly very loud and crowded. Sabrina meets Puck’s eyes over the top off her sister’s head, and he smiles at her again, still a small and tired smile, but a real one. She smiles back. They’re going to be okay.


End file.
